Meet the women at the head of the gym revolution

Put down the kale smoothie, cast aside your exercise tracker: getting healthy isn’t about stratospherically high intensity workouts and posting photos of your rippling abs on social media. In fact the very thought makes Joan Murphy, the 36-year-old co-founder of Frame fitness studios, sigh. An unusual sentiment, perhaps, given that she and business partner Pip Black work in an industry that effectively measures your social worth based on how many squats you can do in 60 seconds, but changing the way we see training has secured the mums-of-two a cult fitness following.

In the decade since the of launch of Frame, they’ve opened five studios (with two more set to open inside the next six months), designed a workout-wear range with Whistles, a pre and post-natal fitness programme that has been beamed onto computer screens from Australia to Dubai and a training academy for wannabe instructors. Not bad for two women who met aged 26 when Murphy knocked a TV off its stand on a mutual friend’s boozy Easter getaway.

Early classes included gems such as ‘Hip Hop Abs’; these days, the 1,000 options on offer each week include Bend it Like Barbie, mini trampoline-based Rebounding and Music Video

It was that unabashed enthusiasm Black, 34, says, that drew her to the former New Zealand track cyclist. The next morning, they were both “happily eating hot cross buns for breakfast; that night, we were the last two standing on the dancefloor. It was so nice to meet someone who had the same sense of wanting to do everything [as me].”

A sedate cup of tea with the fitness mogulsCredit:
Langley/2015 Langley

Within six weeks, Murphy had told Black of her plan to launch a new breed of fitness studio that didn’t trade on year-long memberships or heavily structured programmes insisting on attendance a set number of times per week, but a pay-as-you go model that afforded commitment-free flexibility. Within two months Black, a former England hockey player, had quit her job in advertising and was sleeping on Murphy’s sofa because she “couldn’t afford rent anymore.”

They came up with an ethos ‘fitness shouldn’t be a chore’, wrote a business plan, cycled to various London properties to try and find a suitable home for their venture and, after a year of plotting, networking and getting funds together, opened their first “obnoxiously colourful” outpost in East London’s Shoreditch.

When the studio started up in 2009 the women, both of whom shared a love of sports and business degrees, split the workload down the middle. “For the first four years I’d be on reception in the morning while Pip was teaching,” Murphy explains, “and then we’d switch in the afternoons.”

Bend it like Barbie? Wait, but Barbie can touch her head with her feet...Credit:
Langley/2015 Langley

Early classes included gems such as ‘Hip Hop Abs’; these days, the 1,000 options on offer each week include Bend it Like Barbie (‘Flexible, long muscles means long, lean limbs and who doesn’t want that?’), mini trampoline-based Rebounding (‘A great cardio workout, which gets your lymphatic drainage going’) and Music Video (‘all about escaping reality of the every day and letting out your inner diva’).

There are more, well, normal options too, from pilates to aerobics and boxing,that make up 30,000 classes a month taught by members of their 150-strong instructing team. Many, point to their laid back brand of flex-ercise as the key to their success. “A lot of our competitors are focused on weight loss and what you look like,” Black says. “We’re focused on what you feel like, so it’s about leaving Frame feeling in a better place than when you came in. It’s not all about having a six pack or being the fastest. For most people, that’s not what matters to them, what matters is that they feel great and happy, and the rest of their life will fall into place around that.”

Hop on your bike and get yourself down to one of Frame's fitness studiosCredit:
Langley/ 2015 Langley

Selfie mirrors encouraging gym-goers to share their Lycra-clad physiques with the rest of the social media sphere - now ubiquitous at the growing number of pay-to-train fitness boutiques in Britain - don’t feature at their studios; similarly, “you’re not going to find a leaderboard at Frame. It’s a bit more about escapism and letting yourself go,” explains Murphy. “We’re not about to start making Framers compete.”

When it comes to our national fitness habits, which in the UK has seen the industry climb to a value of £4.7bn and now counts 9.7m Brits as members of some kind of exercise facility, competition has become a highly lucrative - and destructive - force. “You do see people who take it too seriously, or that it is becoming addiction, and that’s where it becomes a bit dangerous,” Black says. “Our industry has a little bit of a reputation for preying on people’s insecurities,” adds Murphy: something that became all too clear when a mother approached her for advice on how to deal with a 13-year-old daughter who was refusing to eat entire food groups and could talk of nothing but what exercise class to do next after the clean eating craze took hold. Murphy feels the trend got a bad rap because people “took it to the extreme”, despite it’s original positive message which was not to eat processed foods.

She is less forgiving, though, when it comes to the wildly unrealistic expectations of women’s post-pregnancy bodies. The pair has had four children between them in the last three years; Murphy finds the images people flood social media with with as “alarming. It almost feels like we’re going back in time when it comes to snapping back and looking as you did before weeks after birth.” It has been nine months since she had her daughter and, though she looks enviably toned in a leopard print jumpsuit when we meet, she has been giving herself “a really good talking to” about not piling on the pressure to rush back to her pre-pregnancy figure.

“It’s hard,” she says, but “you have to give yourself some slack” - unlike one mother she was told of recently who hired a night nurse for her newborn so that she could be well rested enough to undertake personal boxing sessions three weeks later. “You see people taking it too far,” says Black. “It’s almost like they want to prove they’re still hardcore.”

Move Your Frame: Simple Home Workout with Gliders

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MumHood, their pre and post-natal fitness programme, seeks to tackle such misplaced aspirations head on, and Murphy was re-introducing new mothers to fitness last weekend. Like their counterpart Framers, ‘Hooders are proving to be a devoted bunch. Murphy and Black’s formula is, after all, fairly straightforward - designing fitness for people like themselves. “A lot of fitness businesses are run by men, you have boards full of grey hairs. We come from a very different perspective of what do we want, and what do women want?” asks Black.

They hope to launch outside of London but are growing to accept that they can’t do everything at once. “We’re hard on ourselves because we want to do the best [we can], but you have to let some fires burn and some things smoulder,” Murphy says, knocking back a well-deserved espresso. “It’s a balancing act. The vision was to get people to have fun with fitness, and we’ve always stuck to that,” she adds. Judging by their growing empire, it’s working.